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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Homosexuality Hard to Explain Using Darwinian Orthodoxy

Under
the thinking encouraged by many a modern materialist, almost
everything about us can be explained by evolution and our genes. But
there are difficulties in such thinking, one of which is properly
accounting for the widespread existence of homosexuality.

Darwinism
is centered around the idea that evolution slowly increases the
prevalence of traits which tend to increase an organism's likelihood
to survive until reproduction (and also the likelihood of the
organism's reproduction). So suppose there were two genes in
different organisms of a species, one which caused very strong sexual
interest, and another which caused complete lack of sexual interest.
According to conventional evolutionary theory, the first gene would
cause more reproduction, which would cause the gene to become more
and more common (all other things being equal), as the gene was
inherited more and more often; but the second gene would cause less
reproduction, which would cause the gene to become less and less
common, because the gene would be inherited much less frequently.

How,
then, can we account for homosexuality using such principles? Surveys
indicate that between about 2% and 6% of the population are gay or
bisexual. Given that very many gay people would never answer “Yes”
when asked if they are gay, the actual percentage may be even higher.

Today
homosexuality is generally believed to be an inherent tendency, not a
choice; so under Darwinian conventions we have little choice but to
assume that homosexuality has a strong genetic component. It has
been estimated that homosexuals reproduce at only 20 percent of the
rate that heterosexuals reproduce. It would seem that a
straightforward calculation using Darwinian conventions lead us to
the conclusion that homosexuality should have died out long ago.
Whatever genetic basis might be behind homosexuality should have
become less and less common, because of the vastly lower reproduction
rate of homosexuals. It would seem, therefore, that homosexuality
shouldn't exist, at least not in its current prevalence of perhaps 5%
of the population.

Biologist
J.B.S. Haldane imagined a case in which 99.9 percent of the
population had one gene, and only .1 percent of the population had a
second gene. If there was some reason why the second gene was 1% more
likely to be inherited, then within 4000 generations, things would
completely switch around so that 99.9 percent of the people would end
up with the second gene, and only .1 percent would end up with the
first gene. The example illustrates how strongly evolution tends to
get rid of genes that are less likely to be passed on to descendants.

So
how can we account for homosexuality under conventional Darwinian
assumptions? Some theories have been suggested, but they haven't been
very convincing. In this article evolutionary biologist David P. Barash discusses some
possibilities for explaining this paradox, but he just doesn't seem
to be able to get to first base.

Barash
first mentions “kin selection” as a possibility, saying of
homosexuals “perhaps they are able to help their relatives
rear offspring, to the ultimate evolutionary benefit of any
homosexuality-promoting genes present in those children.” That's
very speculative, and Barash gives no evidence to support it, except
mentioning some tiny Samoan gay group which he claims “lavish
attention upon their nieces and nephews.”

Then Barash mentions a
“social prestige” theory, claiming that gay men became priests or
shamans, and that “perhaps the additional social prestige conveyed
to their heterosexual relatives might give a reproductive boost to
those relatives, and thereby to any shared genes carrying a
predisposition toward homosexuality.” But Barash admits that this
idea is “lacking in empirical support,” which means there is no
evidence for it.

Another
theory for the survival of homosexuality is that it had something to
do with what is called group selection. As Barash puts it, “Although
the great majority of biologists maintain that natural selection
occurs at the level of individuals and their genes rather than
groups, it is at least possible that human beings are an exception;
that groups containing homosexuals might have done better than groups
composed entirely of straights.” Judging from that wording, it
doesn't sound like that theory is on solid ground, since it
contradicts an assumption made by the “great majority” of
biologists.

Barash
also mentions a “balanced polymorphism” explanation, saying “the
possibility cannot be excluded.” Again, not a solid speculation,
since no evidence is provided. He also mentions the possibility of
“sexually antagonistic selection,” but says there is “no
evidence for this idea.”

So
while Barash mentions quite a few possibilities, he gives the reader
no confidence at all that evolutionary biologists have any good
explanation for why homosexuality has not died out because of
evolutionary factors. Barash has nothing but strained speculations,
and the only evidence he claims to have is a thin and dubious claim
involving some tiny group in the distant islands of Samoa – a
country with a total population of only about 200,000.

It
would therefore seem that the large-scale existence of homosexuality
is a significant problem for Darwinian orthodoxy. In fact, as
I explained in this essay, Darwinian orthodoxy has quite a few
difficulties accounting for numerous aspects of humanity, such as our
abilities for math, language, philosophy, introspection, and
tendencies such as spirituality, aesthetic appreciation, and
altruism, most of which don't do much good from a “survival of
genes” evolutionary standpoint. It would seem that while Darwinian
concepts are a valuable contribution that explain a great deal,
Darwinism may be seriously oversold as some kind of “this explains
everything” theory to account for human nature.

These are hard to explain using only Darwinism

Could
any unorthodox thinking lead us to other possibilities that might
account for homosexuality?

I
know of one unorthodox hypothesis about the cause of homosexuality.
The hypothesis goes like this: (1) some people alive on Earth have
had previous earthly lives; (2) a male homosexual is typically
someone who was previously reincarnated as a female; (3) that person
is attracted to males because of a residual attraction to males
carried over from a previous life as a female. The only evidence for
this hypothesis is the evidence for reincarnation, which may be much
stronger than many people think, due to the research of Ian Stevenson at
the University of Virginia.

Another
unorthodox hypothesis is the hypothesis that a large part of the
blueprint or schema for a human being is stored outside of a person's
DNA. I explained this idea in my previous post entitled “Half of
the Blueprint for You May Be Stored Outside Your Cells,” in which I
pointed out the curious fact that the species of plant known as rice
is believed to have 38,000 genes, but humans (almost infinitely more
complicated) are believed to have only 23,000 genes. In that post I
summarized this idea as follows:

Genes
are a very important determinant of human nature. But as they are
merely recipes for making proteins, we cannot at all explain all the
exquisite features of human nature by assuming that the secrets of
human nature are all stored in merely 23,000 genes. There may well be
some completely undiscovered information storehouse that also is
crucial in determining human nature – an unknown noncellular “dark
genome.” When a human body and a full human mind comes into
existence, it may require information from cellular genes and this
mysterious noncellular“dark genome.”

If
there is some kind of “dark genome” that might help to explain
human nature, homosexuality could be an aspect of that, perhaps some
permutation of human nature stored among various other permutations
in that “dark genome” (here “dark” simply means currently
undiscovered). This “dark genome” or “second genome” might
be unrelated to reproduction rates, so within such an information
storehouse the continued existence of traits related to homosexuality
might be plausible enough.

Another
unorthodox idea, which no doubt will infuriate some fundamentalists,
is that homosexuality has been deliberately included as part of the
human mixture by a higher power, who wants homosexuality to exist so
that it can one day be a significant brake on out-of-control
overpopulation.

These
ideas are admittedly speculative – but no more speculative than the
totally speculative musings of Professor Barash, who seemed “lost
at sea” when trying to give an orthodox Darwinian explanation for
why homosexuality still is widespread.

Postscript: According to the book Dataclysm: Who We Are by Christian Rudder, a Google researcher has reported that 5 percent of porn searches are for gay porn, and that such a percentage is consistent from state to state in the US. This data tends to back up both the idea that homosexuality is inherent, rather than something largely chosen (given the local drawbacks of "choosing to be gay" in some US states such as North Dakota and Mississippi); and it also suggests a relatively high gay population (5% rather than just 2%). Such data tends to accentuate the explanatory problem mentioned in this post.

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All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.